Marketplace for digital private securities will be a first in Canada
Finhaven Technology Inc. (“Finhaven”) was founded on a core, central belief: that the smart application of technology will be used to eliminate friction from buying, selling and handling securities in both public and private markets, automating the exchange of documents and certificates that slows the current system down.
It’s a bold vision, but we knew we needed to start somewhere to bring the market along. And that somewhere is with private securities at a time when more and more companies are staying private — and staying private longer.
After three years of hard work, we received notice from regulators that we have regulatory clearance allowing us to launch Finhaven Private Markets Canada (operated by Finhaven Capital Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Finhaven) — the first marketplace for private securities in Canada built on Distributed Ledger Technology using digital securities.
Finhaven Private Markets will be the first and only private marketplace for institutional and accredited investors in Canada that offers secondary trading of private securities using blockchain technology infrastructure to make it all happen. And, we are the first in Canada to achieve regulatory clearance in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec — a monumental achievement given that we needed these public stewards to revisit regulations put in place at a time when DLT and digital securities were not even imagined. This regulatory certainty is our “moat” and represents a significant barrier to entry for competitors.
We are proud of other firsts, particularly the approach we have taken to how capital markets technology and infrastructure are built. The capital markets we see today have been built from the top down, as the market relies on the truth of the record by a certain institution’s ledger and the reconciliation of the ledgers of those institutions. That means custodians and intermediaries are required to process and validate transactions, taking the power away from buyers and sellers and shifting it to the middlemen. Leveraging DLT, our technology platform democratizes the system by giving the source of truth to the owners of securities through the creation of an investor’s self-custodial digital “wallet”.
This bottom-up approach starting with an investor’s wallet will continue to simplify the market system and create efficiency by removing the drag in the current system, which takes time and effort to display the truth of capital market ledgers in the required details. Finhaven and Finhaven Private Markets are leading the way by taking us back in time when purchasing a share was simple, with buyer and seller and witness all that was required to make a trade.
